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Here Comes The Advice

Joyce Brothers Tells Oprah And Steadman What To Expect

Dr. Joyce Brothers gained her initial fame answering obscure questions about boxing on a famous 1950s game show.

Now the psychologist confronts a more dramatic query: Would Oprah Winfrey make a good wife?

November Good Houskeeping beckons Brothers to speculate on what kind of wife Winfrey would make for longtime steady Steadman Graham.

Basically, she concludes, Winfrey would be just fine and offers tips on assuring same, including getting used to substantially less adulation than she's accustomed to ("as a wife, she'll have to do without some of that special pampering") and, importantly, avoiding spats over money.

To the latter end, Brothers urges that she and Graham set up three banks accounts: hers, his and theirs. Brothers bolsters her contention that his having control of his own money is important by noting research that concludes that men whose wives earn much more than they do are "11 times more likely to die prematurely of a heart attack."

But, then, if the Oct. 29 Economist is correct, it might be safer if Graham and Winfrey move to Seattle:

The British newsweekly makes much of a new Journal of the American Medical Association report that the survival rate for someone who has a heart attack when there's somebody nearby to notice is 30 percent in Seattle due to a good medical-emergency system and city layout. That compares with 4 percent in Chicago.

Quickly: November Out offers a rare interview with big-shot, multimillionaire Hollywood talent manager Sandy Gallin, manager of Michael Jackson, Dolly Parton, Neil Diamond and Martin Lawrence, among others, and a member of Hollywood's "pink Mafia." Gallin, 54, discusses the industry's relative tolerance for gays on the business side of things, then segues into his own breakup with his longtime, much younger companion, prompting his suggestion for an appropriate personal ad for himself: "Old, rich Jew with great house seeks gay male, 22 to 30; smooth, beautiful, great smile, smart, fun, lustful, sexual, adventurous, healthy." . . . November Smart Money derides lax regulation of and disclosure by mutual funds, suggesting that buying shares in such funds can be "a crap shoot based on data that are scandalously out of date, incomplete, often irrelevant and at times misleading." . . . November-December Mother Jones, clearly disappointed by Bill Clinton, corrals tips for the president from 24 public figures of varying political persuasions, including Ralph Nader and Jerry Brown, with neo-conservative columnist John Leo even urging his tossing those baggy jogging shorts. Elsewhere there's a nifty keeper of a chart on herbal remedies that the magazine feels the government should allow to carry health information, such as garlic's power to reduce cholesterol, ginger's preventing motion sickness and chamomile's reducing chances of ulcers. . . . Nov. 7 Time is depressing on how relief workers are being increasingly terrorized by warring factions in Rwanda, while Newsweek looks at how the seemingly discarded notion of spheres of influence is creeping back into world affairs as the big, wealthy nations fight over turf. . . . October Lingua Franca, an accessible look at academe, profiles Bruno Latour, heir to a French wine fortune, who's making his mark as a possibly path-breaking sociologist who critiques modern science. In sum, he contests the assumptions that there is scientific fact and that scientific knowledge constitutes transcendent truth. ($6, 22 W. 38th St., New York, N.Y. 10018).